Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday August 09, 2014 @03:58PM
from the pernicious-disease-needs-spanking dept.

Zothecula (1870348) writes "While there has been progress made in the fight against Alzheimer's, our understanding of the dispiriting disease remains somewhat limited, with a definitive cure yet to be found. The latest development comes at the hands of researchers from Yale's School of Medicine, who have discovered a new drug compound shown to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's in mice."

If I read that correctly (yeah, I RTFA) what that stuff does is facilitate the transfer of short term into long term memory.

Forget Alzheimer (please, no lame puns here), every student on this planet will want that stuff. I sure know I would've killed to get that shit to stuff all that nonsensical crap into my brain that I had to learn for a few tests that were about as interesting as watching the carpet warp during hot Summers.

That's why it'll initially only be tested on worst-case human patients, those with essentially no quality of life or are just about dead already. An uncle-in-law with severe late-stage cancer ended up on some kind of cancer drug test and we're pretty sure that he was in the group with the active drug, as he improved quite a bit and probably got three or four extra good years compared to his initial prognosis. Had he not gotten the drug he'd probably have died

Also if you RTFA look at figure S2, there are many strange things going on. In fig S2C there are bands that look too similar. In fig S2D there are some that don't match with thier quantification (eg 3mg/kg TC has clearly reduced GLuN2B phosphorylation but this does not show up in their quantification shown in figure 2D). It looks like there are serious problems with this study. I am sure if I look closer there will be more oddities.

Mayne will be reading this as saying 'there's a way cure Alzheimer'; actually it isn't a cure, it just covers up some of the symptoms of the still progressing disease. This is comparable to painkillers - they take away some of the pain, which is good, but the underlying cause is still there; not a problem if you have a passing headache, but it can be much more serious if it is something that slowly gets worse, like an infected tooth, a slipped disc - or cancer.

Actually involuntary euthanasia = murder. That's kind of the reason that euthanasia isn't legal. It's potentially very hard to prove (especially when the patient has some cognitive disability) whether or not it was in fact voluntary or not.

The backup idea is, in fact, not at all stupid. Although I doubt there is some backup ready for use (if some god has it, it is improbable that he/she will yield it, provided that he/she did not so yet), a kind of a backup can be done as a precaution.

While we are still light years away from a full mind upload (of course, if we were able to do that, Alzheimer's would become just a minor nuisance), we are better and better in storing information about what a person saw, heard, and even felt internally. Provide

I would love to lose some of my brain, have it regrown and start over fresh. The adult brain plasticity is awful. Forgetting your wedding anniversary is a small price to pay for being able to learn a new instrument.

You can always tell an article is based on junk science when it contains the words "Alzheimer's," "cancer," or "AIDS." I'd bet my last cent at least two of the researchers involved in this are implicated in fakery by next week.

Hasn't this post been on here before?All kidding aside, I hope some headway is made in this field. I have no problem remembering technical things that I learn and once I learn them once, it is very rare for me to forget. But I am finding myself, at 30, confusing the chronological order of events, repeating conversations, and thinking that I may or may not 'have already done this before'. It kind of feels like a mild cross of aphasia and alzheimer's.

I think we all hope in this, regardless of our age. And, unless we destroy ourselves in some nice world war, or unless science will be oficially banned on religious grounds, the cure will be found. Alzheimer's is no magic, there is some underlying cause, and when we find it, we will find a way to block it, although it can be technically challenging.

I personally think (but this is just a guess) that we will have to learn pretty much details of neuronal functions at the lowest biochemical level, and also abou

Let's hope that this treatment works well, and is approved for human use quickly. Terry Pratchett's abilities to tie fascinating details of human experience, knowledge, and even science into an entertaining and educational story is an incredible loss to the world. Even if you only recovers enough to enjoy the well-earned adulation of his fans, the chance to thank him personally for his work is worth significant medical research.

It's interesting you bring this up, because Terry has lobbied quite a lot for permission to commit assisted suicide due to his affliction. Will he/we thank those people who prevented him from doing so if they do come up with a cure?

I suspect that Mr. Pratchett would be somewhat grateful, though finely appreciative of any irony, if he's still in condition to do so. A lot of his stories contain tough choices, and struggles with amazing burdens. If he decides to go this way, I hope someone can find an orangutang to hand him a book to read to sleep.

All this drug does it improve the conversion of short-term memory to long-term memory. This is a problem in patients suffering from Alzheimer's but no way can it regain memory stored in neurons already lost to Alzheimer's. I hope this treatment works, but it's not even clear it will stop the progression of the disease to it's ultimate conclusion.

If every time I read a story starting with "_______ reversed in mice!" it ended up being an actual advancement in medicine, by now we would be immortal [huffingtonpost.com] and immune to almost every disease.

A recent study has found low vitamin D levels associated with Alzheimer's disease, as well as a bunch of other ailments. It seems like modest daily supplementation with vitamin D3 might be a good idea if Alzheimer's runs in your family.

No, mice don't get alzheimer's disease in the wild. They don't live long enough to. A domesticated mouse can sometimes develop dementia entirely on its own as it ages, however. Any mouse, or any creature for that matter, which happened to live long enough in the wild to develop such conditions would not survive for long without human intervention.

Cancer doesn't impose the same kind of survivability impact that dementia does. An animal in the wild with cancer may not live much longer, but can continue to fend for itself for relatively quite a long time often almost right up until the time the disease kills them. An animal with dementia cannot even fend for itself in the wild and would die *VERY* quickly, even though the disease may not otherwise be damaging to their physical health.

Domestic dogs and cats often live long enough to develop cognitive dysfunction. Although little data has been collected on older animals in the wild, if they were to develop dementia-like symptoms, they wouldnâ(TM)t survive very long after.

Simply put, such dementia would leave the animal without essential survival skills, and unless they are being cared for by people, they would die. Rabies causes irrational behavior, but does not deprive the animal of the ability of the cognitive skills necessary for survival. Certain other forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer's, which is also what this slashdot story is about, does.

Citation needed. I've seen plenty of animals with Rabies and other essential forms of dementia survive for quite a while, long enough to have been a potential vector to several thousand people.

My last dog lived to be 16 years old, which is pretty old for a medium-sized dog. We ended up putting her down because, one night something happened and she just would not stop barking. She didn't eat, didn't sleep, didn't move, just laid there constantly yelping (and not out of pain either) for three days. When we took her into the vet to put her down, even the vets could tell she wasn't herself (she would get grouchy and mean around other people-even had a bite warning sticker on her vet folder). If t

Not to burst anyones bubble, but any created that doesn't eat or move will not have a very long existence.Any creature with full Alzheimer's would not survive long either.But as in Humans, I would imagine Alzheimer's takes a while to fully render the creature demented.

Yet they do live long enough to get cancer, which primarily occurs in the elderly. I don't think think that your simple model of disease incidence increasing with days alive should be assumed.

This is a common mistake. Some types of cancer are primarily affecting the elderly, but some others peak at childhood, or at early adulthood, and yet others can affect a person regardless of age (glioblastoma is the most common and most feared example).

(Sorry for not providing more examples; I don't remember them from the top of my head and right now I don't have the guts for googling for cancers that kill children).

In addition, you must take into account that lab mice are all from relatively few genetical

What a joke it is - endless fraud from psychopaths who enjoy torturing animals all day.

One of my friends is a geneticists (in fact, more of my friends are). She is extremely sensitive, and looks very sad and distressed every time they have to kill a set of lab rats after finishing an experiment - which is exactly what the law requires them to do. They go a long way to ensure that the animal does not feel any pain at all, if possible (by the way, humans in terminal states of certain diseases would beg for such a swift and painless death - and they can't have it, again due to the law).

Unless your proposal involves turning the old people into soylent grey, there definitely is. It's a particularly slow and very, very, unpleasant way to die(not so much because of any gruesome physical symptoms as because gradual and relentless loss of assorted important congnitive functions is both terrifying and increasingly incomprehensible as you lose more of them) and makes the victim substantially dependent on caregivers some years before they otherwise might be. Very hard on the patient, very hard on their relatives, and quite expensive, often for a number of years.

And here caring for Alzheimer's patients was one of the few up and coming employers of a large segment of the population. But I say who needs Alzheimer's? We have the House of Representatives and the republic right wing and they are ding bats enough for us. We need no more brain dead in America.

I'm not sure that the incentives line up in this case: Alzeimer's tends to be expensive because of the amount of care and nursing people require as their cognitive state declines; but the pharmaceutical options are sparse. People would beat down your door for the chance to pay for pills what they now pay for nursing if you had something(even if it has to be taken twice daily forever) that was suitably effective. Anyone who could would likely pay more because the disease itself is so nasty. Seems like a very

"Normal" Alzheimer's can affect people as young as 40 (there are super-early, genetic-based variants that can hit even earlier, but that's in fact a different disease I think). Such a human still could provide >10 years of work, possibly qualified work, and has a family which will care about him/her, which degrades their work ability greatly (you *won't* be working as well if you haven't slept for a week due to trying to quell Dad's nightm